Tag Archives: Fifth Doctor

Post navigation

We enter my top five with no shocks remaining, least of all this adventure. Often voted one of the very best Doctor Who adventures ever, Peter Davison’s swansong is one of the most emotive and gripping stories to ever grace the classic series. It is also however, one of the grittiest, with an incredibly high body count, an undeniably brooding and sinister tone, and cliffhangers that left a seven year old Dan very confused.

Along with Planet of Evil, this was one of the very first Doctor Who adventures my dad bought on VHS, and therefore one of the ones most firmly imprinted upon my childhood. This adventure is justifiably the highlight of Peter Davison’s debut season; not only a well told story, but also one that brings back an old foe, and has the ultimate emotional twist.

We have covered in other reviews the stories that comprised Doctor Who’s 20th season. Resolved to celebrate the series’ history, producer John Nathan Turner brought back a returning nemesis for each adventure. In the middle of the season was a loosely linked trilogy featuring the Black Guardian, last seen swearing painful death to the Doctor in The Armageddon Factor. This powerful being, the embodiment of darkness, chaos, and destruction, finally succeeded in tracking the Doctor down, and decided to enlist a helper to aid his cause.

In Season 20 the Doctor Who production team decided that the Doctor would face off against a returning foe in each adventure, originally intending that the season would conclude with an adventure entitled “The Return” – which was delayed until Season 21 as Resurrection of the Daleks, leaving viewers instead with the lamentable King’s Demons as an unworthy substitute! While the season opened with the return of Omega in Arc of Infinity, and the Mara in Snakedance, the season’s three middle stories were covered by a loose trilogy featuring the Black Guardian, last seen cursing the Fourth Doctor in The Armageddon Factor.

Logopolis is a story I both love and hate all at once. A fitting end to Tom Baker’s seven seasons as the Doctor, I remain unable to watch this story without believing that maybe, just maybe, if I wish hard enough the Doctor won’t die at the end of episode four. But he always does, it’s always heartbreaking, and I am always moved by Baker’s calm implacability as he acknowledges his time has come to a close … and a new season is about to begin.

Tom Baker provided many iconic moments in his time as the Doctor, and it was only fitting that he should be given a truly dramatic sendoff. Having escaped his old nemesis the Master in the previous adventure we find a melancholy and brooding Doctor, possessed of a strong sense of foreboding and deciding that he needs to fix the chameleon circuit on the TARDIS. As he proceeds to source the measurements required to recalibrate the circuit by measuring an earth Police Box, he discovers that the Master has escaped from Traken, and is following every move he makes. More unsettling still, is the presence of a ghostly Watcher, who seems to be just as determined to follow the Doctor.

The story may be entitled Logopolis, but it is not until a good way through episode two that we actually arrive on the titular world. If anything however, this build up makes the climax even tastier, as the Doctor explains to Adric the principle of Block Transfer Computation – creating matter from pure mathematics, and how this ought to restore the chameleon circuit. The Master may make his actions evident throughout the opening two episodes, but it is not until episode three that we see Ainley, channeling the spirit of Roger Delgado, and gloating at his apparent triumph over the Doctor. For ultimately Logopolis is a story of one Timelord chasing another – the Doctor fleeing to Logopolis, hoping to evade the Master, and the Master hiding his TARDIS within the Doctor’s TARDIS so that he can find Logopolis, which he understands to possess a great secret.

The story builds to a dramatic climax, as it is revealed the Logopolitan mathematicians were using their skill for Block Transfer Computation to excise entropy from the universe, and stave off the end of all matter. The Master’s interference brings their project to a halt, and introduces overwhelming entropy that begins to destroy the entire universe. The impending catastrophe forces the Doctor to form an unwilling alliance with his oldest enemy, as they aim to restart the Logopolis programme from a new home on Earth.

Such a dramatic story would be overblown in just about any other context, but as the finale for Tom Baker it is perfection. So grand is the scheme that one easily loses track that this was also the first story to feature Janet Fielding as Tegan, who stumbles into the TARDIS by complete accident. Sarah Sutton also (clumsily) returns in episode 2 after the production team decided to keep Nyssa as a permanent companion, giving a foretaste of the crowded TARDIS that was to undermine Season 19.

The reason they are easily overlooked is entirely valid however – everything is building up to the climax of episode four. Whatever listlessness Baker displayed in the previous two seasons is lost, and he rises marvelously to the occasion of his swansong. To me, his portrayal of a Timelord contemplating regeneration is only bettered by Peter Davison in The Caves of Androzani, as he manages all at once to combine a melancholy foreboding with a stoic acceptance. This anticipation is accentuated through the role of the mysterious “Watcher” – a character all in white who mainly watches from afar, and who is mistaken for “The Master” (Adric) or “A friend of the Doctor” (Nyssa), and is revealed at the very end to be nothing less than the Doctor’s future, unregenerated self.

There is something wonderfully moving about the final five minutes of Logopolis. Baker foils the Master’s plans to hold the universe to ransom, but in so doing falls to his death. As he lies helpless, surrounded by his companions, he sees each of his prior companions from Sarah-Jane to Romana, before smiling, and telling his friends that the moment is prepared for. The music rises to a crescendo, the Watcher merges with the Fourth Doctor, and the bright young face of the Fifth Doctor emerges. I may think that The Caves of Androzani is a better Doctor Who adventure, but Logopolis is nevertheless the best regeneration story.

It was the end. But the moment was prepared for. And it was brilliant.

To watch Tom Baker’s final adventure as the Doctor, buy it today on the BBC Store!

Peter Davison’s debut as the Fifth Doctor owes much to Season 18 Script Editor Christopher H. Bidmead’s love of mathematics. When invited to replace the original Season 19 debut story with a new script, Bidmead would revisit certain ideas he had used in Tom Baker’s swan song Logopolis – in particular the concept of recursion, which in that story had manifested itself as a TARDIS within a TARDIS. For Castrovalva, Bidmead would put this concept on steroids.

Peter Davison’s first broadcast adventure was not actually his first recorded adventure – by this stage they had recorded Four to Doomsday, The Visitation, and Kinda. In practice this works extremely well, providing a TARDIS crew already well settled with one another, allowing them to pull off an ambitious regeneration story. Picking up directly from Logopolis (including a rare pre-title sequence film section reprising the regeneration) the TARDIS crew escape from the Pharos Project on earth to find the Doctor highly unstable – the first time in the show’s history it is overtly suggested that a regeneration can go wrong. The Doctor spends most of the adventure trying to find a peaceful space in which to recover while his regeneration completes – initially a room in the TARDIS known as the Zero Room, then latterly a dwelling of simplicity, the titular town of Castrovalva. Behind this story, very much in the theme of recursion, are layers of traps within traps, all set by the Master.

Kindapping and then releasing Adric at the very start of the adventure, the Master impels Adric to send the TARDIS directly into a supernova. In the truest style of the Hooded Claw, the Master then lays a trap within a trap – the town of Castrovalva itself. Leaving information about the fictional town in the TARDIS databanks, the Master uses Adric’s mathematical genius to use a skill revealed in the previous adventure of Logopolis – the capacity to build matter through pure mathematics. Adric constructs the entire town as a trap for the remaining TARDIS crew, and the Master lies in wait (disguised, obviously!) for the right moment to strike.

The more thoughtful reader might conclude with some justification that the entire plot is needlessly complicated – but to write off the story on these grounds would be to miss the enjoyment of the story. In rather the same way that The Edge of Destruction was crucial for building the relationship of the initial TARDIS crew of Season 1, Castrovalva really allows the viewer to get a better flavour for how Nyssa and Tegan would relate to the new Doctor; unfortunately for Adric, he spends most of the episode imprisoned by the Master, perhaps foretelling the rather grim destiny the producers had in mind for him. While the inspiration for the story is undoubtedly mathematical (making this story one of my dad’s favourites) it is not so overtly mathematical that it is impossible for the less mathematically minded (viz. me!) to follow!

Davison himself plays his role superbly – there is a wonderful moment in episode 1 in which he appears to regress to the mannerisms of the First and Second Doctors – very well acted, and an utterly charming nod to the show’s heritage. As debut stories go, Castrovalva is one of the very best, and a very pleasing conclusion to the ‘New Beginnings’ trilogy. Perhaps because it borrows so heavily from themes in Logopolis, it is harder to imagine this story working so well as a standalone adventure. The fact that it nevertheless does, is very much to its credit!

Want to watch Castrovalva? You can buy it today on BBC Store for £4.99

We have reached a special section in my classic episode countdown, as over the next three weeks we will be reviewing three stories that I struggled to place in a clear order, mainly as I have come to regard them as one story in three parts. The three stories come at the end of Season 18, when Tom Baker’s time as the Doctor was coming to a close, and at the very beginning of Season 19 as Peter Davison took on the unenviable role of filling Baker’s shoes. Baker had played the Doctor for seven years, significantly longer than any of the previous actors to play the role (Hartnell and Troughton were in the role for three years; Pertwee for five) and the prospect of a new actor stepping into the role generated a large amount of uncertainty.

New producer John Nathan-Turner therefore decided to adopt a trick first used when Baker replaced Pertwee. In Season 12, the production team used the familiar faces of UNIT for Baker’s debut story, before bringing back the familiar foes of the Sontarans, the Daleks, and the Cybermen. For the conclusion of Season 18 and the beginning of Season 19, JNT brought back the character of the Master, last seen as Delgado’s Master in Frontier in Space, and as a charred husk in The Deadly Assassin. With Roger Delgado sadly departed after his untimely death in 1973, the decision was taken to cast a Delgado lookalike, Anthony Ainley, and to show the regeneration of the decayed Master into a new, younger Master. A further idea to bring Elisabeth Sladen back to play Sarah Jane Smith for four episodes proved ultimately unsuccessful – Sladen quite sensibly realising she would have played a bit part at best.

Following on from the E-Space Trilogy, the series follows a loose trilogy beginning with The Keeper of Traken, in which the Master returns, followed by Baker’s swansong Logopolis, in which the Doctor falls to death attempting to foil the Master’s latest madcap plan for universal domination. While not initially intended that Ainley would return for Peter Davison’s debut story Castrovalva, it was eventually decided to have the debut of Season 19 follow directly from the conclusion of Season 18, meaning that one is able to watch from Keeper of Traken to Castrovalva as one continuous narrative, even though each story is independent and stands strong in their own right – perhaps reflecting why BBC initially released these stories in a single boxset entitled ‘New Beginnings.’

I struggled to place these three stories in order. I love them all equally, have come to regard them as one story, and if I could award them joint 26th place, I would have done so. I have nevertheless chosen to bite the bullet and attempt to rank the stories – and over the next three weeks you will get to find out which of the three I have enjoyed the best.